The cultural foundations of terrorism: Institutional Anomie Theory and evidence from the MENA region

This study extends Institutional Anomie Theory to examine terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions. Using country-year data from eight MENA countries between 2006 and 2020, the analysis assesses how culturally informed structural pressures and institutional conditions relate to variation in terrorism. Negative binomial models initially suggest that cultural proxies, particularly corruption, and factors such as education, are significant predictors. These, however, do not hold under inference appropriate to a small number of clusters. Under a wild cluster bootstrap, corruption and the other measures are indistinguishable from zero, with the exception of education; none of the associations is robust to country fixed effects; and the education effect disappears when interpolated survey measures are replaced by observed data. Armed conflict is the most consistent correlate, remaining significant in the pooled bootstrap, although in the full sample it is not distinguishable from zero once country fixed effects are added. The study demonstrates that cross-national terrorism estimates built on few countries and interpolated cultural measures can overstate the reliability of cultural and institutional effects, and it specifies the conditions under which Institutional Anomie Theory could be credibly tested in such settings.